A former Michigan State sexual assault counselor who criticized how the MSU athletic department and football coach Mark Dantonio have handled sexual assault allegations involving athletes is pushing back against Dantonio's characterization of her assertions as "completely false."

Lauren Allswede, who left the university in 2015 over frustrations about how administrators handled sexual assault cases, told Outside the Lines in a story that published Friday that MSU administrators' entire approach to such cases has been misguided for years, especially in cases involving athletes.

"Whatever protocol or policy was in place, whatever frontline staff might normally be involved in response or investigation, it all got kind of swept away, and it was handled more by administration [and] athletic department officials," Allswede, who worked at MSU for seven years, told Outside the Lines. "It was all happening behind closed doors. ... None of it was transparent or included people who would normally be involved in certain decisions."

Allswede told Outside the Lines that about seven years ago, an attorney from the university's general counsel's department came to her office to try to reassure her that coaches were taking allegations of sexual violence seriously. Allswede said the attorney told her how Dantonio had dealt with a sexual assault accusation against one of his players: He had the player talk to his mother about what he had done.

"That did not reassure me at all," Allswede said in the Outside the Lines report. "There's no guarantee that that had any effect, any help, whatever."

On Friday evening, Dantonio said accusations about him and his program mishandling sexual assault allegations, including dealing with one complaint directly, are "completely false."